Service Innovation
Dr John McIntosh is a thought leader and has been providing innovative solutions across the health industries and other environments for many years! These vary from local to global solutions for gaps or deficiencies in services and support.
Local Services
One of these innovations was the GP Locum Service that has effectively provided locum and holiday relief for local GP's that was never previously available in the central Queensland regions.
Another was the vaccination program that Dr John set up which increased Mackay vaccination rates to being the highest in Queensland and the 5th highest in Australia. He has also run Asthma Education in schools, the weekly Radio Talkback programs on the ABC, the ATSI After Hours emergency service and GP computerisation support. Formal presentations to the Dept of Health also resulted in new Medicare item numbers being created to encourage practices to employ practice nurses and improve vaccination levels.
Within the practice setting, Dr McIntosh was the driving force behind the building of 6 multi-disciplinary health centres across Central Queensland - Pioneer Medical Centre in 1997, the Mackay GP Superclinic in 2011, Walkerston GP Superclinic, Marian GP Superclinic and Hay Point Medical Centre in 2014 and City Superclinic Mackay in 2015.
He has set up efficient practice systems that have assisted most Mackay practices and continues to improve the provision of health care at every step. He was the first person to bring the Melanoma Scanner, Siascope, into the region to improve accuracy of melanoma detection under the trading name of Advanced Mole Clinic, now part of the Mackay GP Superclinic.
He has also set up new systems for chronic disease management that he happily shared with all practices to improve services provided by all GPs. These systems are still in operation in many local practices today, combining practical processes and computerised systems to ensure quality care for the community.
At the National level, Dr McIntosh was fortunate to have access to the Minister of Health, who was receptive to the concepts for practice service improvement and willingly instituted programs suggested by Dr McIntosh in two main areas. The first was to provide items numbers for practice nurses, aimed at increasing practice nurse numbers and the second was the payment of incentives for practices when they achieved certain levels of vaccination provision within their patient group. Both programs were instituted nationally and were highly effective and continue in some form today.
Dr McIntosh has also created innovative solutions in the mental health area with the creation of the TUFMINDS App with his wife Dr Eli. The program uses unique processes to improve mental resilience, eliminate negative thoughts and increase understanding and willingness to help other people at risk of suicide. They generously have allowed this app to be distributed completely free with the specific intent of reducing the suicide rates around the world.
Mental health strategies that Dr McIntosh has developed is the free services for mental health patients. and up-skilling the doctors in the City Superclinic to allow them to manage the higher end mental health patients that the public sector is unable to service due to their excess workload. Again, this service without any cost to these patients, makes a huge difference to help this extremely disadvantaged group especially when many practices are unwilling to take on this workload.
Drug and Alcohol addiction issues are another area where Dr McIntosh has created innovative and unique approaches to provide practical community-based solutions. He set up the community-based detox service for ICE and other drugs. This operates out of the City Superclinic with doctors here specifically up-skilled to manage these patients effectively.
He also provides a no cost service to the only residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation service in Mackay, when no other doctors were willing to provide this service. He provides the complete medical supervision of the rehab service on an ongoing basis.
Due to the lack of residential rehab in Australia and failure to achieve approvals for multiple sites across Australia, he and his wife have also set up a service in Lombok/Bali, Indonesia. This high-level service provides residential rehab for drug and alcohol problems to provide an avenue of recovery for anyone committed to getting clean.
Globally, Dr John McIntosh has set up a unique cloud based Occupational Health Service which allows international companies immediate access to medical information, reports and injuries in real time and in a standardised form. This allows international consistency for service provision, assessment and approvals.
Dr John McIntosh can be seen to provide innovations progressively over the years to overcome service failures both locally, nationally and internationally and has dedicated his life tirelessly to help people receive better services and practical solutions to health and social deficiencies.